Ted Cruz’s Evangelical Gamble

On Nov. 13, 2013, one year after his son was elected to the United States Senate, the pastor Rafael Cruz delivered a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The topic — ‘‘What does the Bible say about why Christians need to be involved in the political arena?’’ — was one of his favorites, and notably appropriate for a school founded by Jerry Falwell, who also founded Moral Majority, the once-powerful political action committee. Over the course of a 30-minute speech that touched on everything from the need for school prayer to the similarities between President Obama’s Washington and Fidel Castro’s Havana, the question of why slowly gave way to the question of who. The pastor concluded by telling his audience, ‘‘God is saying to you: ‘Vote for righteous people.’ ’’

In retrospect, the pastor’s speech that day might be seen as the first (albeit subtle) public move in the eventual bid for the presidency by his son. Already Ted Cruz’s strategists were discussing a run. His longtime adviser Jason Johnson would go on to spend most of 2014 researching how Republicans had won and lost presidential elections, while the senator appeared at various Iowa fund-raising events. When word began to circulate in March 2015 that Marco Rubio and Rand Paul would be announcing their candidacies sometime in April, by the end of the Senate recess, Cruz’s game plan started to emerge. They set their sights on a date in late March, which would allow Cruz to dominate the news and draw a quick infusion of campaign money for at least a week before attention turned to Rubio and Paul. Needing to move quickly, and not wanting to tip off the opposition, Cruz’s senior staff sought out a telegenic venue where a heavily conservative audience could be assembled on a moment’s notice.

That was how, 16 months after his father took the stage there, Ted Cruz became the first politician to launch a presidential campaign at Liberty — the largest Christian university in the world, with an enrollment of 77,000 students. His March 23 speech, which he hand-scribbled the evening before and delivered without benefit of notes or a teleprompter, included this pivotal thought: ‘‘Today, roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.’’ That exhortation, an echo of his father’s plea to ‘‘vote for righteous people,’’ reflected the Cruz team’s key political calculation: Of the 22 states that will be casting their ballots for a Republican nominee between Feb. 1 and March 5, 11 of them feature a Republican electorate that is more than 50 percent evangelical. Even more significant, the first state to vote is Iowa, roughly 60 percent of whose Republican caucus-goers describe themselves as evangelical Christians. As had been the case in recent election cycles, if Cruz could persuade this voting bloc to coalesce around him, then in this crowded field of Republican candidates he would almost certainly emerge the winner in Iowa. And unlike previous caucus winners, Cruz was already building a formidable national campaign organization that could capitalize on an Iowa victory and propel him toward the nomination.

One morning early in January, in the lobby of a public library in Onawa, Iowa, I listened to Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, as he explained a central challenge of his previous few months. ‘‘Prior to March 23,’’ Roe said, ‘‘if you were to word-cloud ‘Ted Cruz,’ which we do every day — take all the Google mentions and Internet searches, dump them into a file and form a cloud — you can’t find ‘evangelical.’ ’’ In other words, voters were largely unaware of the Tea Party firebrand’s religious faith. To convince evangelicals that Ted Cruz was the ‘‘righteous’’ candidate, Roe told me, his team needed to sell him as such, from the very beginning: ‘‘Regardless of what you’ve got in the bank, you’d better determine the narrative of the campaign, and show that’s who we are, every day.’’

Behind the scenes, Cruz and his team were in fevered competition with Rubio, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to lock down the evangelical vote. The Cruz campaign courted movement leaders like Dr. James Dobson, who formally endorsed Cruz on Dec. 17 and joined the candidate on the Iowa campaign trail soon after. Eleven days after Dobson’s endorsement, the Texas political activist and longtime Cruz supporter David Barton gathered about 300 ‘‘faith leaders’’ for a meet-and-greet with Cruz at the ranch of the Republican billionaire Farris Wilks in Cisco, Tex. ‘‘He was with them six hours, and about an hour and 20 minutes of that was nothing but prayer, and Ted was right in the middle of it,’’ Barton told me. ‘‘The spiritual leaders wanted to pray for the country, and he was completely comfortable with that, and that was a pleasant surprise to many of them.’’

As a fund-raiser, Ted Cruz has given victory-starved evangelicals some cause to believe that his campaign is, as the Iowa conservative talk radio host and Cruz supporter Steve Deace puts it, ‘‘superior to what we’ve seen from any other movement conservative that’s ever run for the presi­dency.’’ Cruz has raised over $50 million from more than 600,000 donations, including those from the Wilks brothers of Texas, who also have given $15 million to Cruz’s super PAC: all numbers that establish him as a top-tier candidate. He has built large campaign organizations in the states immediately following Iowa — New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — and has also traveled extensively through the March 1 ‘‘Super Tuesday’’ states of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Though his team is not staffed with the sort of elite Republican operatives who work for Rubio and Jeb Bush, it has thus far waged one of the most professional and error-free campaigns in the field.

The results of these efforts will become manifest on Feb. 1, when Iowa Republican voters will settle the current hard-fought contest between Cruz and Donald Trump. Trump poses a threat to Cruz’s presidential ambitions because, unlike the Texan, he does not seem to possess an electoral playbook, and instead can get by with something Cruz lacks: a lot of potential voters seem to like him and are titillated by the idea of him as president. Exactly two weeks before the Iowa caucus, when Trump himself spoke at Liberty University, he botched a Bible quotation and, against university rules, uttered a profanity, two miscues that Cruz would never commit. All the same, Liberty’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., declared that ‘‘Donald Trump is a breath of fresh air,’’ and Trump has pulled ahead of Cruz in some national polls of evangelical voters.

But Cruz’s campaign manager, Roe — a beefy veteran operative from Kansas City, Mo., with narrow, gleaming eyes — told me that by at least one unit of measurement, their tactics were already working. ‘‘In the word clouds we used to do before he announced, the words that always came up were ‘Texas,’ ‘Tea Party,’ ’’ Roe said confidently. ‘‘Now it’s ‘Christian,’ ‘evangelical,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘leader,’ ‘strong.’ ’’

Early on a Friday morning in January, two dozen Cruz campaign volunteers gathered in the stairwell of their temporary sleeping quarters at a former college dorm near Des Moines International Airport and bowed their heads in prayer. A leader of the volunteers, Ken Brolin, a white-haired veteran of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 run, said in a quiet voice: ‘‘Many of us pray and believe that when we are diligent and have our hands behind the plow, that you are going to honor and bless that diligence, Lord, and allow us to have this man that we have a heart for — that we believe is your man — to step into the White House. And Father, we would thank you so much for that.’’ Brolin concluded by asking: ‘‘Let every appointment with these undecided voters be the time that you want us to talk to them. And Lord, please allocate patience for everyone else that doesn’t agree with us.’’

The last remark provoked knowing chortles in the stairwell. The volunteers came from 26 different states, but the plurality of them were Texans. The undecided Iowa voters they met on doorsteps or on the phone often commented on their unmistakable accents. The volunteers would acknowledge their origins and then say: ‘‘Well, is there anything we can tell you about Ted? Because we’re from Texas, and we know him really well.’’ As one of them, Maggie Wright — a 70-year-old from the Fort Worth area who made her rounds in a sedan painted with portraits of Cruz — recounted to me: ‘‘We say: ‘Well, we know Ted’s positions. He’s for states’ rights, for all the Constitution, he will not allow us to bash the gays but won’t let anybody do jihad on the Christians.’ ’’

Though Cruz must do well in Iowa to establish momentum in the other early caucuses and primaries, the state in recent history has been a dubious springboard to national success. Since 1976, three winners of Iowa’s contested Republican caucuses have ultimately gained the national party’s nomination, but only one — George W. Bush, in 2000 — went on to become president. The last two caucus winners, Huckabee in 2008 and Santorum in 2012, managed to rally Iowa’s social conservatives but lacked both the resources and the breadth of support to compete against John McCain and Mitt Romney, whose campaign themes were less pitched to the Christian right.

And so the Cruz campaign has sought to assure Iowa evangelical leaders of two things: that Cruz is one of them, and that he can win the presidency. In return, Cruz’s campaign team has sought from Iowa evangelical leaders not only their endorsement but also their commitment to rally congregants to the polls. Leading this effort has been Rafael Cruz, who since his son’s announcement has spent 29 days in Iowa, talking to fellow evangelical ministers in groups ranging from 25 to 350.

Bob Vander Plaats, a major evangelical activist in Iowa, told me, ‘‘Evangelicals have really felt a great need to have one of the their own in the White House, and the last couple of election cycles they’ve frankly felt a bit used.’’ He went on to say that in the general election, ‘‘we’ve gone with the guy who can win, but let’s not talk about principles and wink-wink he’ll deliver once he’s there. And I think you now see that frustration in the huge numbers who stay home on Election Day.’’ Vander Plaats has enthusiastically endorsed Cruz; he says the conventional wisdom regarding an evangelical nominee can be proved wrong.

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Scenes from rallies and campaign offices supporting Senator Ted Cruz in Iowa, where Republican caucuses will be held Feb. 1.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

‘‘When you run a true conservative like Ronald Reagan, you’re going to win,’’ he said. ‘‘George W. Bush, who said his mentor was Jesus — you win. The past two elections, we’ve been leaving millions of conservatives home, because they see no reason to vote. Not this time. Now we have a full-spectrum conservative in Ted Cruz. This is a base election, and everyone knows it. And I think he crushes Hillary.’’

What unites the evangelical bloc with the rest of the Republican base is a shared hostility toward not only those they see as antagonists to the American way of life — ISIS, undocumented immigrants, apostles of political correctness — but also their perceived appeasers in Washington. It’s for this reason that many conservative Christians find themselves drawn to the outsider Trump, despite the latter’s shaky command of Scripture. And this is also why it’s not enough for Ted Cruz to brandish his evangelical credentials in order to win in Iowa and beyond. He must also remind Republicans that his biography is that of a proud foe of the political establishment.

It’s a notable feature of Cruz’s political résumé that he became an outsider only after the insiders rebuffed him. He first materialized in the political world as a domestic-policy adviser for the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. He quickly became known for his arrogance and ambition: One story was that he introduced himself to a colleague with the proclamation, ‘‘I’m Ted Cruz, and I’m going to be Texas’s first Hispanic governor.’’ Little of today’s ideological staunchness was apparent back then. As one of the Bush campaign’s top officials recalls of him: ‘‘Conservative? Yes. Principled conservative torchbearer fighting the fight in the bowels of the campaign? Nope.’’

Cruz wrote in his 2015 autobiography, ‘‘A Time for Truth,’’ that it was ‘‘a crushing blow’’ when he failed to receive a top post in the Bush administration. Not long after becoming the Texas solicitor general in 2003 at age 32, Cruz confided his ambitions for higher office during a four-hour meeting with the Republican establishment’s reigning guru, his fellow Texan Karl Rove. The Bush consigliere advised the young solicitor general to bide his time. He spent the next few years developing a reputation as a notably tough and creative lawyer, winning several high-profile Supreme Court cases, and in 2008 he left office for a partnership at a private firm in Houston. The following year, Cruz decided to run for state attorney general after it appeared that the seat might become vacant. Cruz devotes several pages in his autobiography to describing how he persuaded former President George H. W. Bush to endorse him, only to be bullied by Rove into withdrawing his name so that a Bush crony could run in his place. (An adviser involved in the machinations told me that Cruz had misleadingly implied to the elderly Bush that he would be the only Republican in the race, when in fact it was well known in Republican circles that two friends of the Bushes were also eyeing the job.)

Today’s Washington outsider made a second pitch to the Republican establishment in 2010, before he kicked off a long-shot campaign for the Senate seat being vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison. Both the state and national Republican chieftains offered him little in the way of encouragement. While trying to convince the Texas party chairman at the time, Steve Munisteri, that he could be a legitimate candidate, Cruz asked, ‘‘What if I managed to raise $5 million?’’ Munisteri recalls saying, ‘‘Well, then at the end of the day, that’s $5 million you won’t have anymore.’’

It was only then that Cruz began to make a virtue out of his inability to impress the insiders. His 2012 Senate race was straight out of the Tea Party playbook, complete with endorsements from Sarah Palin and Rand Paul. Compared with his current quest for the presidency, the Senate candidate Cruz’s courting of evangelicals was comparatively muted. This was because his chief opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, was himself a rock-solid social conservative. Still, the upstart could not afford to cede the evangelical vote to Dewhurst. Cruz’s former digital director Vincent Harris (who is now affiliated with Rand Paul’s campaign) says that Cruz’s father played an important role in his upset victory. ‘‘When Ted couldn’t be somewhere, Rafael was always there, and he got those crowds so fired up,’’ Harris recalls. ‘‘Rafael was the dog whistle to evangelicals, saying things that libertarian and Tea Party types wouldn’t hear as much but that evangelicals really understood.’’

After scoring his upset victory in 2012, Cruz took his Tea Party platform with him to Washington, while his evangelical predilections remained in the margins. (Unlike his current monologues on the presidential campaign trail, Cruz’s numerous speeches in 2013 seldom if ever contained biblical references. Though he quoted from Proverbs during his 21-hour anti-Obamacare floor speech, Cruz actually spent far more time reciting the Dr. Seuss book ‘‘Green Eggs and Ham.’’) What did resurface was the same arrogance that had alienated his Bush colleagues, and that Cruz in his autobiography says he put behind him after the Bush experience taught him ‘‘to treat others with greater respect and humility.’’

Cruz has continued to struggle to get along with his Republican allies. Just 10 days after winning his Senate election in Nov. 2012, Cruz spoke in Washington before a decidedly friendly gathering hosted by the Federalist Society, of which he is a member. Many of the attendees had supported the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. In his speech, Cruz gleefully mocked the conservative credentials of the vanquished candidate, saying, ‘‘I’m pretty certain Mitt Romney actually French-kissed Barack Obama’’ during their final debate. As one attendee who had contributed to both Cruz and Romney later said, ‘‘He managed to offend so many good people in that room who had killed themselves for Mitt.’’

Cruz also wasted little time offending his Republican colleagues in the Senate, well before any ideological battle lines had been drawn. Barely a month after the new Texas senator was sworn in, the Republican senators held a retreat in an ornate Library of Congress reading room. According to a senior aide who was present, Cruz ‘‘arrived late, raring for a fight, sat down and almost immediately started engaging aggressively and theatrically in a way that was so out of place for Senate politesse, but especially for someone brand-new. People were looking around like, ‘Who the hell does this guy think he is?’ ’’

Now Ted Cruz wears the Republican establishment’s loathing of him like a badge of honor, but his campaign team is also aware that voters seldom elect candidates they deem unlikable. On the Iowa campaign trail, Cruz makes a point of complimenting audience members on the excellence of their questions, pouring them coffee and submitting to their selfie requests. ‘‘I think for too long he spent too much time reciting Ted Cruz’s greatest hits instead of relating to people,’’ says Steve Deace, the Iowa radio host. ‘‘As it happens, he’s very brilliant, but he’s also funny and relatable. Let people get to know a guy named Ted, is what I say.’’

But the questions about whether the guy named Ted can win the nomination, let alone the presidency, run deeper than concerns over his likability. In particular, the campaign’s audacious decision to focus more on revving up the evangelical community than on broadening its outreach to young and Hispanic voters is a high-risk strategy that, should it backfire, might do more than cost Cruz the White House. His deeply conservative rhetoric could cost Republicans the Senate, erode their majority in the House and reinforce the party’s reputation among emerging demographic groups as the party of embittered and narrow-minded white men.

Cruz makes a special point in his stump speech to mock this apocalyptic scenario. After all, he tells audiences, the same fears were voiced in 1980, about an idealistic conservative candidate whom the Washington elite considered an extremist. Instead, Cruz reminds them, the outsider named Reagan inspired millions of disenchanted voters who yearned for a return to American primacy, following the failed policies of a Democratic president both at home and abroad.

Even Cruz’s own advisers find fault with this analogy. As one of them said to me: ‘‘I think he’s much more of a movement conservative than Reagan was. I mean, he’s not putting Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.’’ The Reagan-Cruz parallels break down on other levels as well. America is not in a recession, as it was in 1980. The Republican nominee’s opponent will not be an unpopular president but instead, in all likelihood, a female nominee who will be seen as a history maker. Reagan benefited from a less-polarized electorate, attested to by the fact that he garnered 27 percent of the Democratic vote in 1980. By contrast, only 7 percent of the 2012 Democratic electorate chose Romney, who, unlike Cruz, had governed in the blue state of Massachusetts. And the Reagan Revolution was abetted by the shift of white Southerners, who had long viewed themselves as Democrats, to the Republican Party. That revolution has already been fought and won by the Republicans. To win the general election without reaching toward the center, Cruz will have to create his own groundswell with another conservative voting group.

The supposition that evangelicals could be this group is also shaky. Cruz’s team argues that about 10 million such voters who did not vote in the 2000 election turned out for Bush in 2004 and have stayed home since. The Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd maintains that the increase in evangelical voters was much smaller, prob­ably closer to two million. (Given that the overall turnout increase from 2000 to 2004 was less than 17 million voters, and that nearly half of those voters went for John Kerry, the 10 million estimate would seem to be mathematically un­likely.) Dowd argues as well that the dominant issue in 2004 for all voting groups, including evangelicals, was national security; socially conservative causes like marriage and abortion, Dowd says, ‘‘didn’t even make the top five.’’ Researchers also dispute that Romney drove away evangelicals in 2012. ‘‘In fact, they were overrepresented — they were 20 percent of the population but made up 26 percent of the electorate,’’ says Robert P. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute. Moreover, 78 percent of them cast their ballots for Romney, the same share of the evangelical vote that Bush received in 2004.

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Cruz supporters praying at a rally in Iowa, where 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers have described themselves as evangelical Christians.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

But perhaps the diciest assumption made by the Cruz campaign is that it not only can turn out more registered evangelical voters than Romney did but also can recruit millions of unregistered evangelicals at the same time. Every demographic group includes many people who have no interest in the political process, and persuading them to engage is not as simple a matter as offering an appealing slate of issues. Should she become the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton will be mining the electoral turf for new voters as well. And in general, the task is an easier one for Democrats, given that their targets are more densely concentrated in urban areas. Cruz’s strategists assert that Clinton will not inspire voters the way Obama did, and this may well be true. But the same might be said of Cruz among various voter groups. With his hard-line stance on immigration, will he repel even more Latino voters than Romney, who received a paltry 27 percent of their votes? Though Cruz might catalyze large pockets of unregistered evangelicals, Jones and others suggest that such voters are primarily in states like Alabama and Tennessee that are already firmly in the Republican column. Pursuing them with a deeply conservative platform could gain Cruz very few electoral votes, while costing him significantly among moderate voters in swing states like Virginia and Ohio.

For some Republicans, this situation suggests a more disquieting comparison. ‘‘What’s flawed about Cruz’s approach is that it’s the same argument Barry Goldwater made in 1964,’’ says Doug Gross, a longtime fixture in the Iowa Republican establishment who worked on the Bush and Romney campaigns of 2000 and 2008 and has not endorsed anyone in the 2016 field. Though 80 percent of Republicans fell in line with Goldwater at the polls, only 36 percent of voters under 30, 38 percent of women and 6 percent of nonwhites preferred him over the landslide winner, Lyndon Johnson. ‘‘While Cruz may seem pure and virtuous within the confines of his own base, you can’t get elected with those voters, because there simply aren’t enough of them. Now, within the Republican Party, the establishment and Tea Party are probably in a standoff. But within the general electorate, there are far more of me than there are of him.’’

There is only one way to know for sure what will happen if Republican voters nominate Ted Cruz — and some in the party establishment are already braced for it, with Job-like resignation. As Gross told me: ‘‘We may have to learn this lesson the hard way. This may well be the year that Cruz wins the nomination and we have to have a bloodletting as our medieval cure.’’

‘‘I was looking up and seeing Joshua 24:15 on the wall,’’ Cruz said one morning in early January, to a crowd of 200 or so wedged among the shelves of a Christian bookstore in Boone, Iowa. Squinting, he read from the sign: ‘‘ ‘Choose you this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ And what a powerful reminder of values that Washington, D.C., seems to have forgotten. What a powerful reminder of the values that built this great country.’’

This country, Cruz said, is ‘‘in crisis.’’ But, he added, ‘‘I’m here this morning with a word of hope and encouragement and exhortation. All across the state of Iowa and this country, people are waking up. There is a spirit of revival that is sweeping this country.’’ The candidate went on in a cadence that frequently descended into stage whispers or attenuated pauses, his face clenched in Shakespearean rapture, varying barely a syllable from the monologues he would deliver with equal fervor in 27 other stops on this six-day swing through the Hawkeye State.

Whether Cruz was making a personal connection to this audience in Boone — whether they truly liked the messenger and not just his message, whether they saw in him the affable Reagan to whom he invited comparison — was difficult to judge. But at least a dozen times during his reliably 32-minute oration, someone standing nearby me murmured, ‘‘Amen.’’ Some of their faces went taut with resolve as he declared: ‘‘The men and women of this room scare the living daylights out of Washington. And when politicians are terrified, liberty is never safer. What we are seeing is a grass-roots army coming together!’’

And when Cruz’s final words invoked the ‘‘Judeo-Christian values’’ that made America ‘‘that shining city on the hill,’’ the audience exploded in applause. Many of them made their way toward the candidate. Others stood and looked at one another for a few moments, blushing with pleasure. It took a while for all of them to file out of the cramped little bookstore. Once Ted Cruz’s grass-roots army had dispersed into the streets of Boone, the candidate and his half-dozen strategists climbed aboard the campaign bus and headed an hour westward, bound for another event at a steakhouse in Carroll, Iowa. Before the month was done, Cruz would visit all the state’s 99 counties, delivering with practiced zeal the same singular message: I am one of you, and I can win. He could not pretend to be Donald Trump — wildly unscripted, crass, impossible to ignore or forget. He could only be Ted Cruz, with one case to make.

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was about how Republican voters this season are rejecting candidates with real governing experience.

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